All the President's Men (22 page)

Several days before the Florida primary, a flier on bogus Muskie stationery was distributed, accusing both Senator Humphrey and Senator Henry Jackson of illicit sexual conduct.

During the New Hampshire primary campaign, voters had been awakened in the middle of the night by phone calls from persons who identified themselves as canvassers from the Harlem for Muskie Committee, urging that New Hampshire voters cast their ballots for Muskie “because he’d been so good for the black man.”

During 1971, raw polling data twice disappeared from the desk of the Muskie polling expert at campaign headquarters. This convinced Muskie that he had a middle-level spy, and members of Muskie’s staff
said they were subsequently warned by columnist Rowland Evans that there was a spy in their camp.

•   •   •

Woodward was reading over the Muskie story in the October 12 paper when Robert Meyers called from Los Angeles that morning. He had found Larry Young, a fraternity brother of Segretti’s during their USC undergraduate days, who was to have been the other half of the firm Young and Segretti. Segretti had told Young a good deal about his connections with the Nixon campaign. Woodward started typing.

“Segretti told [Young] that the FBI found out about him from telephone records from the phone of E. Howard Hunt; a lot of phone calls one way, all from Hunt to Segretti. . . . Hunt would give him instructions, but Young doesn’t know what events the specific instructions were connected to. . . . It wasn’t the bugging. . . .”

Woodward was amazed. It had not occurred to the reporters that Segretti’s operation was tied to Hunt’s plans.

“Segretti said to Young, ‘I’m working for a wealthy California Republican lawyer with national connections and I get paid by a special lawyer’s trust fund.’ ”

Kalmbach.
Woodward asked Meyers if he had tried the name of the President’s personal lawyer on Young. Meyers said Young didn’t know who Kalmbach was:

“Young is convinced that Segretti met with Dwight Chapin and with Hunt. Because Segretti talked about his going to Miami to meet with all the ‘key people’ he had always worked with on the phone. And he had earlier told Young that it was Hunt, and Chapin was the general organizer. Segretti would always say, ‘I have to talk with DC. I have to meet with DC.’ At first, Young thought he meant District of Columbia. Then he became convinced DC was Dwight Chapin. . . . Young, too, is said by others to have been a good friend of the USC Republican Mafia and kept contacts with them. . . .

“In Miami, Young thinks Segretti met with Hunt and Chapin and also was asked—don’t know by whom—to recruit and organize Cubans for an assault on the Doral Beach Hotel and make it look as if they were working for McGovern. Segretti refused because he felt it would be blatantly illegal and violent.”

For months the reporters had been picking up information suggesting that the Nixon forces had made routine use of provocateurs in demonstrations, and that such things had been planned for the conventions. But they had assumed that all bets were off after Watergate. Yet there had been an assault on the Doral Beach Hotel in Miami, and there was some evidence that there had been provocateurs in the crowd. Woodward remembered Deep Throat’s words four nights before:
These are not very bright guys.
Somehow the bungling seemed reassuring—it tempered the frightening implications of how far the Nixon forces were willing to go to achieve their ends. Where would their efforts have ended had not the Watergate burglars been so incredibly stupid as to retape the stairwell doors on June 17, leading a security guard to call the cops? Or if Howard Hunt, the supposed master spy, had exercised the elementary caution of using pay phones?

Woodward went into Sussman’s office. The city editor and Bernstein were agonizing over how tantalizingly close they were to establishing Segretti’s contact with Chapin. Meyers’ information from Young established the connection. But Young was not yet willing to go on the record. They went over Woodward’s notes.

That afternoon, Bernstein reached Young at his office in Los Angeles. They talked for more than an hour. Young told him: “Segretti called me in a panic in August. It was about two weeks before the Republican convention. He said he had just been visited by the FBI, and wanted to talk to me very quickly. He was worried because there had been no prior warning that he would be contacted by the FBI. He had felt he would be given such a prior warning, that he would be briefed as to what to say. He wouldn’t say who was to brief him, just that they were the people he was working for. He was afraid of being left out on a limb, sacrificed without any protection or coverage. He wanted some advice as to what he should do. . . .

“Don told me that he was paid from a trust account in a lawyer’s name. He said the lawyer was a high-placed friend of the President and he was instructed to guard that name zealously. . . . He would never divulge any names.”

Bernstein pressed for anything Young could remember about the lawyer. Young thought.

“Oh, yes, he once said the lawyer was in the Newport Beach area.”

Kalmbach lived in Newport Beach and maintained his offices there.

A high-placed friend of the President; a lawyer; Newport Beach  . . .

How had Segretti characterized his political activities to Young?

“Segretti said to me that he was engaged in activities that he called ‘political hijinks,’ that this was part of the President’s re-election drive, that it was supposed to create trouble and problems for various Democratic candidates. . . .

“After he was summoned to the grand jury, he tried to get in touch with his people [who were] in Miami Beach [for the convention]. He was in an absolute panic, even more concerned than when the FBI first visited him. He felt he should have been given prior warning. He was trying to call Chapin. I said, ‘Have you talked to Dwight about this?’ He gave an evasive answer and said he couldn’t get hold of anyone. He was very concerned with Dwight’s name.

“Then I got a call around midnight from him saying he was on his way to Miami, that he had made contact—he wouldn’t say with whom—and they had told him to come to Miami. He said in Miami that he was shown an FBI report of his interrogation—both of them. . . . And he was told to tell the truth [before the grand jury], not to perjure himself, not to worry about it.

“He was to stick to just what he had told the FBI, which was not any damaging material, just about the phone calls from Hunt and some small activities he was doing, some innocuous thing about being involved in some campaign activities, none of the stuff that hit the paper later. When he reported to wherever they report, the U.S. Attorney interrogated him ahead of time in an office and thoroughly went into
everything.

“But in the grand jury, the questions went along on a very easy scale: just the innocuous stuff and some things about Hunt. Nothing about the lawyer. Nothing about whom he was working for. But then, he said, a woman member of the grand jury asked a question about who paid him and whom he knew on the White House staff. Then, he said, the names came out, especially Dwight Chapin’s. He didn’t mention the other names [to Young]. He said he
did
tell the grand jury the name of the lawyer on the West Coast who paid him.”

Now it was definite. The Justice Department had had the information that the President’s appointments secretary and his personal lawyer were involved and had done nothing to follow up. Bernstein again
wondered how the prosecutors could have been manipulated to accept such a decision. “He told the prosecutors truthfully everything that he knew,” Young had said. Bernstein asked Young for other specific details of what Segretti had told him.

“He mentioned a letter or pamphlet for mailing to all members of the Democratic State Central Committee in California—a scurrilous attack on Humphrey, blaming him for the war, calling him a two-time loser, giving the impression it was put out by McGovern people. He said there were some others doing the same thing. He said, ‘I’m just a small fish, a cog, one of many doing the same thing.’ ”

And Chapin?

“My impression is that Don and Dwight are very close. As close as good friends could be. They kept contact over the years. He mentioned that he called Dwight at his home in connection with this. But he’s been somewhat secretive with me.”

How much had he said about Howard Hunt?

“When the FBI came to see him the first time, he learned that his phone number had turned up on a bill to an individual named Howard Hunt. He said he knew Hunt by a different name—an assumed name, a pseudonym—but that he knew he was Hunt. Hunt would always talk in a very whispery, conspiratorial voice, he said, and he thought Hunt was very odd. Hunt seemed to add even more intrigue than was already there, he said.”

The conversation had been off the record, but Young said he would consider putting it on, provided he received legal advice that no violation of the attorney-client privilege was involved. Segretti had never retained him as counsel, had sought him out only as a friend, Young said. He and Bernstein and Woodward and Meyers would stay in touch daily.

On Friday, October 13, Young agreed to go on the record. Woodward went over the details with him a final time, pressing to find if there was any possibility that Young could be wrong or exaggerating Segretti’s dealings with Hunt and Chapin. The answer was no.

Meyers was dispatched to get a sworn statement from Young affirming that the contents of the interviews with Meyers, Bernstein and Woodward were accurate representations of what Segretti had told him.

At last there was going to be a story based almost completely on on-the-record statements that could not be attacked by the White House as coming from anonymous sources.

For two days, Woodward had been trying to telephone Chapin at his office in the White House, a few steps from the Oval Office of the President. His calls, for the first time, were held up at the switchboard while he was asked who was calling and from what number. After about 20 seconds, the calls were put through, but when he reached Chapin’s office, a secretary would say Chapin was busy and take a message. The calls were not returned.

There remained one major hurdle: Meyers had described Larry Young as a defender of “radicals and cop killers.” No phrase was more likely to raise a red flag in Harry Rosenfeld’s office. The metropolitan editor bluntly said he was not about to stake his reputation or that of the
Washington Post
on the word of “some hippie lawyer.”

Happily, Larry Young’s credentials were in order. Woodward made a dozen telephone calls to the West Coast and spent hours talking to members of the bench and bar who vouched for Young’s standing as a respected and responsible representative of the legal profession. Woodward even found out what kind of clothes Young wore (modish but tasteful) and how long his hair was (shorter than Bernstein’s). Rosenfeld was satisfied.

Bernstein began writing the story and Woodward left to make a round of visits at the Justice Department. After several strikeouts, he found a lawyer familiar with the case, alone in his office. Woodward was invited in and sat down. An informal late-Friday-afternoon mood prevailed. They began chatting about Tuesday’s story—the espionage and sabotage in the primaries.

“Yes, we got Segretti through the records of Hunt’s phone calls,” the lawyer said. “The Bureau made random checks on a large portion of Hunt’s calls—there were more than 700 calls altogether. One of them was to this guy Segretti. Let me emphasize that the dirty tricks were probably not illegal and here at Justice we’re sticking to the Watergate bugging itself in the investigation. . . . But I’m worried about the case. The Bureau is acting funny  . . . there is interest in the case at the top.” He wouldn’t say where the top was.

Now, more than ever, it was clear why the Watergate investigation
had been so narrowly focused that the prosecutors had not pursued other crimes—no matter how obvious—unless they were directly connected to the bugging.

Woodward read aloud some notes on the Chapin-Segretti connection, and suggested they might explain high-level interest. He didn’t know if the attorney would be surprised or not.

After some hesitation, the attorney said: “That’s essentially what we’ve been told.”

Woodward said that he was a little afraid of the story because it led straight into the White House—to the gatekeeper at the Oval Office, which was one of Chapin’s functions.

The lawyer smiled. “I’ve wondered several times why you would worry so much about Chapin, who is much lower than Mitchell and Stans. What you’ve been told, we’ve been told about Segretti and Chapin. I can talk about it a little more freely because it really doesn’t have anything to do with Watergate. It was part of the investigation, technically still is, but it’s separate and we’re not pursuing it. . . .”

About 5:00
P.M
., the reporters and editors met to discuss the Chapin story. It would be too long to finish in a couple of hours; they would hold it for Sunday. The Justice Department had turned away from investigating the real conspiracy of Watergate; had focused on the narrow burglary and bugging at Democratic headquarters—the IOC (Interception of Oral Communications), as the Feds called it—and ignored the grand conspiracy directed by the President’s men to subvert the electoral process.

Woodward called a casual acquaintance at the White House to get some background on Chapin. “He is one of those guys like Haldeman and Pat Buchanan [one of the President’s speechwriters and the author of the White House daily news summaries] who got on the Old Man’s bus very early and followed it through the ups and downs,” he was told. “Chapin is the guy who made sure the Old Man’s suit came back from the cleaners during the campaign. . . . He made sure everyone had coffee and made the apologies when the President was late, including calls to Mrs. Nixon and the girls. He probably gave the President a back rub if he needed one during the ‘68 campaign. . . . Dwight is nice to everyone, always says hello.”

The decision to hold the story for Sunday had been made after Woodward had called the White House on Friday for comment. About 8:00
P.M
., three hours after he’d been told the substance of the story, deputy press secretary Gerald Warren called back. “I have a statement from Dwight Chapin,” he said: